The win for 35-year-old Williams continues pattern of the older players
thriving on both sides of the draw

As the veterans continue to thrive on both sides of the US Open draw, 35-year-old Venus Williams put the up-and-coming Belinda Bencic in her place on Friday with a straight-sets defeat. The result continued the high wastage rate among the leading women’s contenders, for the 18-year-old Bencic, who is seeded 12th, had been seen as a potential threat here.

Williams’s continued excellence is a remarkable achievement in the light of the auto-immune condition – Sjogren’s syndrome – that she revealed here four years ago. After ending that season ranked just outside the top 100, she started 2015 as the world No. 19, and stands as one of only three women to have beaten her own sister Serena this year. The others were Bencic herself and Petra Kvitova, the fifth seed here.

Meanwhile the defending men’s champion Marin Cilic had to battle through the first 4hr match of this year’s tournament to beat Mikhail Kukushkin. Their contest took in three tie-breaks before ending in a 6-7, 7-6, 6-3, 6-7, 6-1 victory for Cilic, who has not been able to rediscover his best form this season. He can ill-afford an early exit here because the 2000 rankings points he is defending make up more than half of his overall tally.

Also in the men’s draw, the first fourth-round clash to be confirmed will pit two Frenchmen against each other in Jo-Wilfried Tsonga and Benoit Paire. It is a sign of how deep the French talent pool runs that Paire – who ousted fourth seed Kei Nishikori in the first round – is only their seventh-best player according to the world rankings.

Tsonga, who is the national No. 4 at present, performed an efficient 6-3, 7-5, 6-2 ejection of Sergiy Stakhovsky, the outspoken Ukrainian whose homophobic views have earned criticism from the heads of both men’s and women's tours.